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Jan 24 To LSAT or Not to LSAT

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Do you ever have a moment, where you're like, I don't know, not to be specific, but you kind of feel like, "What did I go to college for, because I don't even know what the purpose of my degree was and all of my internships were in event planning, and I really want to be a badass wedding planner and walk around with a clipboard and have lots of people work for me and be written about by Martha Stewart's wedding magazine and take lots of vacations on the side and go diving with great white sharks, but also what if I went to law school instead because I might need an actual viable financially stable career in the future?"

Anyone? No? Cool. Same.

I don't know if I'm just really unique in this situation, but it seems like everyone knows exactly what they're doing with their lives. Except me. And I know that that's just what people say and what my generation thinks and that society just values traditional careers over non-traditional ones, but you know what? That's just kind of a bummer sometimes.

What if I want to do something totally non-traditional? What if I want to be a wedding planner/ adventure taker/great white shark photographer but I also want stable income and full coverage health insurance? What then, world? What then?

At this point in my life, I'd be happy taking sporadic paychecks over a more stable income, but the full coverage health insurance is non-negotiable because hey, great white sharks have a lot of teeth, and even being a wedding planner is super dangerous because one time I dropped a vase on my foot and broke two toes.

How many of us question our career choices and forgo jobs that play to our strengths and passions for the promise of not paying a month's rent just for a simple doctor's visit?

How many of us convince ourselves that our cubicles are where we really want to be during the day, and that our love of nature photography, or interior design, or travel writing are much better suited as hobbies?

We tell kindergarteners that they can be anything they want. Even when they say they want to be a velociraptor. So why when a college kid says they want to be a travel blogger, it's our first instinct to tell them that they need to have a "real job" too?

Why does society believe that we the bloggers are not worth as much as an investment bankers? Why is an artist not as respected as a lawyer? Why is a celebrity stylist laughable, but a marketing executive remarkable? They're all just things that people choose to do, because they're passionate about it, to pass the time until we can all retire and spend way too much time on a golf course or bird watching.

Because, really, that's the end goal, isn't it? To work and make a living and keep yourself afloat on this tumultuous sea of life until you reach a point where you don't have to anymore. And when we get to that point, it won't really matter what we did anyways, because we won't be doing it anymore. We'll be watching our grandchildren struggle with the same decisions we are now.

But hopefully, when they ask you if they should take the LSAT as a backup in case their beekeeping business doesn't take off, you'll tell them that they don't need a backup, even though you sat on your bed after graduation and panicked about your degree and Googled "easy ways to get into law school" and cried a lot. And you'll look around at your golf course or bird watching bench, and remind them that the end goal is really to just be happy.

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Twenty-three has been the hardest year of my life, straight up. And I say that with zero melodrama and with the common sense that there will be years ahead that are worse and years ahead that are better. I know many of you can relate. Maybe this is just our early 20s, or maybe this is just life—this pendulum swinging between the dark and light, wandering and arriving, wondering and knowing, grief and joy.

One disappointing thing about getting older is noticing the mystique of things that used to excite you fade. Coming into the real world is met with its fair share of challenges, and the temptation to let this harden you is accessible; perhaps it’s autopilot to become jaded. To have a hopeful outlook towards the state of the world, towards your passions, even towards life at times, takes a conscious effort. The reality is you witness (and sometimes find yourself in the middle of) a lot of crash and burn scenarios as you grow up, and it is really easy to let ugly truths cloud your perspective.

Three days after my birthday I got dumped. Plain and simple. I was about to leave for a month in Germany, followed by a more permanent residence in Alabama for graduate school, when my boyfriend said he wasn’t prepared for the distance. It hurt, I cried, and then I drank more wine than I should have.

I spent the time leading up to my trip to Berlin thinking about the what if’s: What if I wasn’t leaving for half the summer? What if I could stay in Nashville? Would things change? Three weeks of driving myself crazy with questions made me realize that I needed to go to Europe, if only to provide myself with a distraction from neurotically checking my ex’s Instagram page. I packed my bags and in mid-May settled into seat 27C on a flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, thinking that maybe this was a good way for me to take a break from the breakup.

Like a dramatic and silent slow action shot in a cheesy multi-million dollar film, I watched in horror as the barista raised the whipped cream dispenser, taking aim at my beloved mocha. But I didn’t want whip. In fact, when ordering, I had specifically requested no whip, please. An internal battle raged within me on whether or not I should say something. Over whipped cream. I was literally contested over whether I should say something about whipped cream.

Because why rock the boat? Even if it’s as inoffensive as asking for no whip.

There are a few things that happen when you graduate college. You celebrate school being finished. You send out job applications with big dreams and starry-eyes. You get rejected and ignored. You send out job applications, and LinkedIn invitations, and cover letter after cover letter—you dream about cover letters—you start losing steam. You want a job. You want a job so badly.

You get a job. You celebrate. You go to your first day in a new pencil skirt with starry-eyes. You love it, for a while. Some days you hate it. Sometimes you wish you could go back to that time when you weren’t tied down to your desk, even though that’s all you wanted. You start losing steam. You want a new job, or to travel, or to do what that girl on Instagram is doing. You want that other life so badly.

And it’s not that what you have is bad, or that it isn’t what you expected. It’s that there are so many reasons to tell yourself that you’re doing something wrong. That you didn’t choose the right path.

I turn 23 at the end of July, meaning I was the baby of my grade all through my academic career. Being the youngest (among other things) somehow made me feel uncool and likely had an effect on my ridiculous effort to prove just the opposite. Self-expression was key here. I found identity in a flowy skirt, Converse sneakers and a Rolling Stones t-shirt in the 8th grade. “Woah, Lane, that look sounds way chill already—how’d you manage to make it even chiller?” you ask? Braces and a DIY hemp necklace, obviously! The universe had surely never seen anything this edgy. I remember feeling like a fraud but also a badass when asked, “Can you even name a Rolling Stones song?” and responding only with a panicked “yes—of course!” before fleeing the room immediately.

I can name close to 10 (lmao, boom) Rolling Stones songs now, but in many ways I still carry around that same confidence-meets-self-consciousness. It’s this stupid thing where I don’t care what people think about me so much so that I want them to know just how much I don’t care. I believe “caring”is what that’s actually called. So just to reiterate: sometimes it’s hard to feel like an adult.

Reflecting on the year, it bums me out to realize how hard I’ve been on myself. Whether that meant kicking myself for not living up to an expectation or kicking myself for being “too much” or kicking myself for not being enough, there was always a reason to kick. But the thing is, all we can do most of the time is try to exist as we are.

That said, I’ll keep this short and sweet with three pieces of advice for those entering their first year after college.

I took graduating really hard. Like, really hard. I left school having absolutely nothing figured out with absolutely no answers, and spent most of the summer crying to my parents and denying the fact that I could no longer get dollar drinks at the bar (one of the rudest awakenings about post-grad life…). I felt lost without my friends, without the walls of UNH that protected us all so neatly, and without my identity as a student.

It’s discouraging when you work something up in your head for so long and nothing comes of it; the moment I put something in there, I can’t let it go for the life of me. And it’s even more discouraging when you realize that what you want may not exactly be what you need. But John Steinbeck once wrote to his sons: “I have discovered that there are other rivers. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers.” I over-analyze literature like I over-analyze everything else, but what I took from this is that sometimes, we try to cling so hard onto what we know, simply because it’s what we know. But you have to allow your dreams to change so constantly because you are changing so constantly. There are other rivers, and other cities, and other places to grow in. And often, they are the ones you would never expect.

Katie is a native of most parts of the U.S., formerly thriving in Nashville and currently surviving in New York. Lover of all dogs (parent to one), classic rock enthusiast, closeted People magazine subscriber, sunbather extraordinaire, avid book lover, failed book clubber, professional intern and nature tolerator are a few ways people have described her. She says what she thinks and hopes people enjoy it, appreciates sharing laughter and coffee with friends, and she anticipates the day when people love people without question or fear.

Katie is a native of most parts of the U.S., formerly thriving in Nashville and currently surviving in New York. Lover of all dogs (parent to one), classic rock enthusiast, closeted People magazine subscriber, sunbather extraordinaire, avid book lover, failed book clubber, professional intern and nature tolerator are a few ways people have described her. She says what she thinks and hopes people enjoy it, appreciates sharing laughter and coffee with friends, and she anticipates the day when people love people without question or fear.

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